At the biggest moment of his political career, he delivered a flat, stupefyingly boring address that drained away all the excitement generated by Sarah Palin's pit-bull-with-lipstick performance the night before. His central message - that it's time to clean up Washington - was incoherent. Yes, McCain has some legitimate reformist credentials. But he's also a 25-year Washington insider who marches in lockstep with George Bush on such issues as the war in Iraq and tax cuts for the wealthy.

"It really is an audacious ploy, to tell people that the country's got to correct the mistakes made by a political party when that's the very party you represent," writes Tom Shales in today's Washington Post. "It's like staging a revolution against yourself - saying that the Republicans have got to go so the Republicans can move in and clean up the mess."

Last Friday there was no shortage of punditry to sift through following Barack Obama's speech. Today the offerings are comparatively light and perfunctory. The bloviators still want to bloviate about Palin's speech, which electrified the convention-centre crowd, if not necessarily the public at large.

"For all the hullabaloo about whether John McCain would match Sarah Palin's performance at the Republican convention, it wasn't even close," observes Jacob Heilbrunn in the Huffington Post. He adds that "most of his speech was a snooze, delivered in the tone of a kindly old uncle reminiscing about World War II before fretting about how those pesky Russians are stirring up trouble again."

And in the Boston Phoenix, Adam Reilly offers a telling (if unimaginable) hypothetical: "Suppose Sarah Palin had somehow ended up as the Republican presidential nominee this year. Suppose she'd picked John McCain as her running mate. And suppose he'd given the speech he did tonight. You know what people would be saying? 'Crap. She should have gone with Giuliani'."

Incredibly, McCain's handlers even managed to reprise the widely mocked green background that punctuated his dreadful speech on the night that Obama clinched the Democratic nomination. But colour coordination wasn't the main problem then, and it wasn't last night, either.

Damning with extraordinarily faint praise is the order of the day at the conservative National Review. "The eloquent absence of eloquence" is the headline on Peter Robinson's reaction piece. In a, shall we say, counterintuitive bit of speech analysis, Rich Lowry instructs us: "Don't focus on the oratory. ... Don't focus on the delivery." The ever-hopeful Jonah Goldberg adds: "I think there was nothing to the speech that actually hurt him."

Hurt? Maybe not. But McCain's speech certainly did not help the Republicans' already precarious standing. The new star of the party is the deeply flawed Palin. McCain's brain trust is desperately trying to smear the media for smearing the Palin family, but the truth is that most of the press clippings, including those about 17-year-old Bristol Palin's pregnancy, have been exceedingly kind.

The real focus of media inquiry has been on more-substantive issues: the bipartisan investigation into whether Palin abused her office by firing the public-safety commissioner for refusing to get rid of her ex-brother-in-law; her selective memory about the "bridge to nowhere"; her association with the Alaskan Independence party, whose founder proclaimed that he had "no use for America or her damned institutions"; and her anti-science positions on such matters as creationism and global warming.

Palin may have aroused the base, but she'll likely prove to be a drag on the ticket among the independents and conservative Democrats whom McCain needs to win.

Most pundits did give McCain decent marks for retelling the story of his captivity in Vietnam. But here, too, he managed to step on his own moment. By letting virtually every surrogate this week speak about McCain's POW experience in dramatic, hushed tones, McCain allowed it to be robbed of much of its power before he finally got to talk about it himself.

The most positive assessment of the speech I could find is by Walter Shapiro, writing in Salon. Though conceding that McCain fell well short of Obama's and Palin's performances, Shapiro says: "McCain may have found the right words to appeal to the voters he needs to win, especially an older generation in hard-pressed normally Democratic industrial states like Michigan and Pennsylvania."

Well, perhaps. But in the immediate aftermath, I think most observers are going to agree instead with Jeffrey Toobin, who on CNN last night called it "the worst speech by a nominee that I've heard since Jimmy Carter in 1980" - "disorganised, themeless ... [and] shockingly bad."